Seniors

I often say that cataracts were the best thing that ever happened to my eyes. I am not exaggerating when I say I could not see the blackboard in first grade. The summer after, I got glasses, and had them upgraded every year thereafter. When I was 16 I got contact lenses, the old hard kind. They stopped my vision deterioration dead. Hooray for hard contact lenses.

The problem with the hard contacts was that if I was short of sleep, they were hard to put in. I then worked at National Airport in Washington DC where my starting and quitting times were completely unpredictable. All too often I'd get off at midnight, or even later, and have to be back at the airport the next day at 6 am. It was really hard on my eyes.

Well, fast forward several decades. For years eye doctors had pointed out that I was growing cataracts, but for nearly three decades they didn't do much. And then I noticed changes in my vision that I did not connect to cataracts. But at the next eye appointment, my eye doctor said, "It's time for cataract surgery." I was relatively young, only 63. Luckily I had an older friend, a woman who had just turned 80, and when I told her of the eye doctor's statement, she said, "Get the cataract surgery! It's the best possible thing!"

She was right. The surgery improved my vision enormously. I joke that I can read small signs on distant hills. Two amazing changes/advantages of the surgery. First is that when I wake up in the morning, I can look across the room and read the clock. Oh, my. Unless you've spent 50 plus years with everything in a blur, you have no idea how amazing that is. The second is that my eyes no longer hurt. All those years where I wore hard contact lenses, my eyes often hurt. Especially when I was short on sleep, which was all too often in those days when I was an airline employee working at National Airport in Washington DC.

So yeah, get the surgery. There will be decisions to make about the exact lens to implant, but that's something to discuss with your eye doctor.

I'll add this. I'm now 72 years old, nearly a decade after my cataract surgery. At the time, at every single appointment, I was at least ten years younger than anyone else in the room. I think that's because all those older people had seen cataract surgery some 4 or more decades earlier, when it was a much more fraught procedure.

The other thing is that at every pre-surgery appointment, anyone either looking at my eyes or looking at the records would tend to say, "Oh, wow." I finally asked how bad my eyes really were. I was told there are four kinds of cataracts, and I had three of them. And that cataracts were rated from 1, you can barely tell they are there, to 4, essentially totally blind. I was a 3 in one eye, and a 3+ in the other. It's amazing I wasn't walking into walls.

But I will also say this. Given the somewhat gradual deterioration of my vision, I understood why people in earlier eras simply accepted that people lost their vision as they got old. I am extremely grateful that I was born in the 20th century, in a time where glasses could pretty well correct my vision, and then I could get contact lenses that were even better, and best of all have cataract surgery that saved me from blindness.